Lonely City

Earlier this month, attending Nancy Reagan’s funeral, Hillary Clinton delivered a peculiarly revisionist encomium, praising the former First Lady for starting “a national conversation” about AIDS and being a “very effective, low-key” advocate on behalf of Americans with H.I.V. Clinton quickly retracted her statement, after high-key advocates pointed out that Mrs. Reagan and her husband had, in fact, been derelict on the issue. A photograph circulated on social media as a reminder of AIDS in the time of the Reagans: an image of David Wojnarowicz, the artist and activist, participating in an ACTUP demonstration, wearing a jacket bearing a pink triangle and the words “If I die of Aids—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.”

Wojnarowicz died in 1992, four years after the photograph was taken. He will be the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in 2018; he is also one of the subjects of “The Lonely City,” a critical meditation on New York, art, and loneliness by Olivia Laing, the British writer. The other day, Laing was in New York, and she stopped by the Fales Library, at N.Y.U., where Wojnarowicz’s archive is kept: photographs, diaries, recordings, and an orange crate crammed with odds and ends which he called his “Magic Box.”

“It feels like his work has this capacity for resisting all those silencings and false histories,” Laing said, as she opened a folder containing an early series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York.” The photographs, taken by Wojnarowicz in the late seventies, show a figure wearing a mask of the French poet’s face while riding the subway, masturbating in bed, wandering the decrepit Hudson River piers. “I can’t think of another artist who works in that same way—the more that attempts at silencing happen, the more potent they become,” she said.

Laing was born around the time those photographs were taken. She lives in Cambridge, England, but the book is about a four-year period when she spent months at a time in New York, after a relationship had fallen apart. Finding herself lonely, she made loneliness her subject, choosing to examine the phenomenon not only through her own experience but also as illuminated by the lives and work of visual artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and Wojnarowicz. In conversation she speaks of “David,” as if Wojnarowicz were an older brother. “The whole book is about that funny closeness that you have with artists who matter to you,” she explained. “It does feel like this weird intimacy. Though I would never call Henry Darger ‘Henry.’ ”

She gingerly opened the crate, which was discovered under Wojnarowicz’s bed after he died. Inside: a stuffed fabric snake, a glittery plastic snowman, a tin crocodile with a real feather protruding from its mouth. “All of these are like childhood toys of someone who didn’t really have a childhood,” she said. The young Wojnarowicz was subjected to repeated abuse: his father beat him, and also served his pet rabbit, cooked, for dinner. Laing opened another folder, which contained a photograph of Wojnarowicz as a child: big ears, braces. “He’s really cute, and really uncared for,” she said. Wojnarowicz used the photo in an art work known as “One day this kid,” in which he recounted the brutal consequences—“strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape”—that followed his desire “to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.”

Laing said she identifies with Wojnarowicz’s sense of not fitting in. “So much of my book is about gender, and frustrations of gender, and that desire to be an anonymous person in a city in a way that I think you only can if you are a man—and a woman never is, because a woman is always on some level a desirable or non-desirable sexual object,” she said. During her New York days, Laing would often go to see performances by Justin Vivian Bond, the transgender cabaret artist. She said that a school friend had reminded her that when she was eighteen she’d said she felt like “a gay boy in a woman’s body.” She went on, “I am aware that my sense of myself is complicated, and an awful lot of people’s are as well.”

Laing opened Wojnarowicz’s diary from 1991, in which he wrote in a neat, urgent hand about his dreams and his pain. After he died, some of his ashes were scattered in protest on the lawn of the White House, which was by then occupied by George H. W. Bush. “Those very late deaths, just before combination therapy, feel so devastating,” Laing said. “There are so many people walking around New York carrying that loss, and the world’s moved on. The historicization becomes ‘The Reagans solved AIDS,’ and that becomes the storyline if there isn’t a pushback.” She closed the diary. “It’s so easy to tell cheerful lies,” she said. ♦